This is the feature data table.
Its columns are: - fid feature ID (integer) fref reference sequence name (string) fstart start position relative to reference (integer) fstop stop postion relative to reference (integer) ftypeid feature type ID (integer) fscore feature score (float); may be null fstrand strand; one of "+" or "-"; may be null fphase phase; one of 0,
1 or 2; may be null gid group ID (integer) ftarget_start for similarity features,
the target start position (integer) ftarget_stop for similarity features,
the target stop position (integer)

Note that it would be desirable to normalize the reference sequence name,
since there are usually many features that share the same reference feature.
However,
in the current schema,
query performance suffers dramatically when this additional join is added.

gid the group ID (integer)
gclass the class of the group (string)
gname the name of the group (string)

The group table serves multiple purposes. As you might expect, it is used to cluster features that logically belong together, such as the multiple exons of the same transcript. It is also used to assign a name and class to a singleton feature. Finally, the group table is used to identify the target of a similarity hit. This is consistent with the way in which the group field is used in the GFF version 2 format.

To overcome problems loading large blobs, DNA is automatically fragmented into multiple segments when loading, and the position of each segment is stored in foffset. The fragment size is controlled by the -clump_size argument during initialization.

This is a mysql-specific method. Given a search string, it performs a full-text search of the notes table and returns an array of results. Each row of the returned array is a arrayref containing the following fields:

column 1 A Bio::DB::GFF::Featname object, suitable for passing to segment()
column 2 The text of the note
column 3 A relevance score.

Title : get_table_id
Usage : $integer = $db->get_table_id($table,@ids)
Function: get the ID of a group or type
Returns : an integer ID or undef
Args : none
Status : private

This internal method is called by load_gff_line to look up the integer ID of an existing feature type or group. The arguments are the name of the table, and two string identifiers. For feature types, the identifiers are the method and source. For groups, the identifiers are group name and class.

This method requires that a statement handler named lookup_$table, have been created previously by setup_load(). It is here to overcome deficiencies in mysql's INSERT syntax.